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Everyone seems to be focusing on building AI based on how the brain works. I don't think this is entirely all of what Kurzweil has in mind. Technology to duplicate the brain neuron-by-neuron (connectome) will arrive much MUCH sooner than knowledge-derived AI. This is already evidenced by current synthetic retinas and cochleas. Duplicating the function of neural devices, even entire brains, will prove to be much less difficult than completely understanding them and building them from that understanding. Expanding their capacity from that point should allow them then to be smarter than humans. The U.S. is working on the mapping side while Europe is working on the understanding and synthesis side. By 2029, I suspect great headway to have been made along both pathways.

In conjunction with an automated (wirelessly controlled), standard-constructed receptacle atop the roof, drone delivery could really... take off. Amazon (or other delivery company) would send a special code via the Internet to the intended receptacle at the intended address. The drone flies out to the location, the drone signals the receptacle, the receptacle signals back with the code, the drone says "package ready", the receptacle opens, package dropped, lowered, or inserted from the drone, receptacle closes, drone flies off, package accessible from interior shoot or attic.

A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale.

NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision. In turn, the data it generates will further enhance the ability of computers to understand the visual world.

While definitely a welcomed advance, it is clear by examining some of the not-so-accurate "attributes" and "relationships", which Neil teases from the associated image text, that such a system would be much better if it had true understanding of language rather than simple statistics. An IBM Watson crawler performing the same task would do a much better job; better still, when crawling within a specific knowledge domain, like medicine.

Google is involved in the project, so we can all imagine the day, perhaps after a year's more worth of crawling/training, when we can send an image to the cloud service and have the service return text that describes the objects, object attributes, relationships, and scene contained within the image. With a little further sophistication, it could return an image clip for each detected object, or in reverse, it could render a scene given the textual descriptions: "OK, Google. Create image with [objects, attributes, etc.]."

It's not hard to imagine the next step being video/audio crawling where the common motions (physics), moving relationships, and sounds of objects and contexts are learned. And when movie scene synthesis arrives... "OK, Google. Create movie scene with [actors, objects, scene, motions, etc.] and send it to...""

I said: "Each mind exists and is experiencing all moments in time simultaneously as "now"."
That should be: "Each mind exists and is experiencing all moments in time simultaneously across all quantum possibilities as "now"."

But the Many Worlds interpretation is also the one that works best with Special Relativity which directly implies that all of time, thus all of the branching possibilities of QM, exist simultaneously. The passing of time is then an illusion perceived as real by the function of human memory. All of time is "now". We each presume that we are in a stream of time because at any given instant, the contents of our perception and memory give us the illusion that we have progressed here to this "now", when in actuality, this "now" and all "nows" are pre-existing, as if the universe along one given pathway is a 4-D crystal, and infinitely dimensional across all possible pathways. (The evolution (entropy) of the universe has all played out in a frozen instant.) The really difficult part for a human mind to realize is that there is no "now" pointer causing them to perceive that this is "now", nor is the pointer moving forward to the next "now" to produce the passage of time. Each mind exists and is experiencing all moments in time simultaneously as "now". That one feels that ONLY this moment IS "now" is completely an illusion, as all moments are in the same timeless instant giving one the feeling of "this moment is 'now'".
So, strictly deterministic, yes, but infinitely varied.

Death is ingrained in the evolution of the genes of all species to help promote change in an environment of limited resources. Death helps to assures that the next generation of genetic experimentation is NOT born into an environment of depleted resources. Yes, most of us would like to slow or completely eliminate aging. However, before we do, we better solve other problems related to resources (food, housing, etc.); otherwise, we'd eventually get to the point of massive genocides and cannibalism.

Paranoia will certainly expand to include motherboards as Chinese motherboards own the market, and similar back door access might be burned into any brand cooperating with the government. Advancement in business and personal computing will take a HUGE hit when this happens.

I recall watching Hurt Locker for free on Hulu well before its release date. I wonder if Hulu had negotiated rights or if one of the Hulu consortium backers made it available as part of a buzz marketing campaign.

...centers of children's brains.
To paraphrase the original article:
This is concerning because religious evangelists (including religious parents) tap into those portions of the brain long before children develop self-control, and most religions--nay, all religions--marketed to kids are high in lies and manipulation.

The data and bandwidth requirements might then be several orders of magnitude higher than for current 3D displays. I suppose, though, that that is a given, and we'll cross that bridge when we get there, as we usually do.